Coming to Feel We Are the Eternal Universe

 

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it...aliens. We are quite urgently in need of coming to feel we are the eternal universe.  

Alan Watts

These are some gems of wisdom gained from listening to Alan Watts today:

• The idea of a difference between matter and spirit does not work anymore...physics stopped asking, "What is matter?" because matter could only be described by its form and what it does.  We can attempt to see right down to the subatomic particles but never arive at basic stuff because there is no stuff there
• Stuff is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus
• All we can talk about is pattern and we cannot talk about the stuff these patterns are made of
• The world is more than some passive, unintelligent junk made by a master Potter...it is a dance of design
• Nor is the world just blind energy or random energy
• We are not seperate from nature nor do we need to fight nature in order to survive. We are nature
• Why be hostile to nature?  We grow out of this physical universe in exactly the same way as an apple grows out of the apple tree. 
• Because of these two theories...(Genesis and scientific materialism/neutonian physics)  we come to believe we are not of this world.
• We come to believe that: Only you yourself exist inside your skin?
• We are not a result of the big bang...we are the process of the big bang. We are all the primordial energy of the universe but we have learned to define ourselves as seperate from it.
• There are no such things as seperate things or events...that is just a way of talking and thinking  about our expereince. 
• A thing is a noun and a noun is not a thing of nature...it is a figure of speech...a concept
• All energy is wiggly yet we try to capture the wiggly world with a net.  A net is something regular that we can use to measure the wiggle, breaking it up into bits...and these bits of wiggles are things or events. 
• In nature...in the physical world...in reality... the wiggle isn't bitted. 
• We are all as continuous with the physical world as the wave is with the ocean. 
• Our consciousness has been hypnotised and influenced so that we do not feel a part of this continuim...so that we believe we  are just bits of the wiggle. 
• We are nothing but something that happens between the maternity ward and the cremotorium... is what we really believe in the fully automatic model...
• We only go on if the game is worth the gamble. The game is worth the gamble.
• In physics prickly people believe the basis of all matter is particle...the goo people believe the basis of all matter is waves
• If there is any such thing as intelligence and love and beauty  you found it in other ppl. ...it exists in human beings. If it is there in us it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. 
• The earth is not a big rock infested with living  organisims any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. 
• This geological entity, Earth, grows people. 
• When as a scientist you describe the behaviour of a human organism you describe what a person does....you cannot define yourself by what this person is inside the skin. Need to describe the environment.
• We really have one system of behaviour.  What I am involves what you are. I don't know who I am unless I know who you are. ...We are not seperate.
• We and our environment and all of us are interdependent systems. 

What you call the external world is as much you as your own body.  Your skin does not seperate you, it is a bridge from which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.

All is well!

Official Alan Watts Org. (2020) Alan Watts-What is Reality? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpHqYnFELLE&t=3175s